If you’re coming to the NYBG on Sunday for The Nature Conservancy‘s Picnic for the Planet, try not to overdo it during lunch! You’ll want to save room for an evening outing sure to have gourmands salivating, because long-time Friend of the Garden Mario Batali is jumping in with an event of his own.

Building on his success in last year’s Family Garden events, the legendary Babbo chef will once again join with the NYBG in raising awareness about the power of the foods we buy and eat. Along with Mario’s partners, Lidia and Joe Bastianich, the trio’s B&B Hospitality Group honors this year’s Earth Day with a special promotion at each of its restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, sending every patron of their fine B&B restaurants home with a special Earth Day gift. Not only will you leave well-fed, but you’ll do so with a packet of B&BHG’s organic Cherry Belle™ radish seeds. It also doubles as a two-for one ticket offer to visit the NYBG this summer, all in the name of bringing environmental responsibility home.
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Mavia Brown is Manager of Corporate Relations at The New York Botanical Garden.

Mitsubishi International Corporation employees celebrated Earth Day last month by volunteering at The New York Botanical Garden’s Mitsubishi Wild Wetland Trail. Mitsubishi Chairman Koichi Komatsu, who is on the Board of the Botanical Garden, even donned waders and ventured into the wetland to help with the cleanup (see photo at right).

“Mitsubishi International Corporation greatly values its longstanding partnership with The New York Botanical Garden,” said Mr. Komatsu. “The Wetland Trail is an important resource for educating local schoolchildren about the environment, and we were glad to offer this contribution of our time for its upkeep.”

Working alongside Garden staff, the volunteers (including Sara Stroman and Joseph Stein in photo at left) rolled up their sleeves and worked hard at a variety of tasks throughout the day, including removing invasive plants that threaten the habitat and replacing them with native trees.

The Wetland Trail and its five acres of wetland plants teach Garden visitors about the importance and ecology of wetlands. A walk along the Wetland Trail is the first experience many school children have at the Garden each year. The Trail’s multitude of plants and animals—such as the turtles often seen sunning on a submerged rock—sparks curiosity about the environment and nature. read more »

You Are Part of the Solution in the Garden’s Cafe Waste Program

Daniel Avery is Sustainability and Climate Change Program Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

Every day New York City’s households and not-for-profits that receive waste handling services from the City of New York such as The New York Botanical Garden generate about 12,000 tons of garbage and recyclables that must be hauled away by trucks to distant landfills and incinerators. The city’s businesses contribute an additional 10 million tons per year of garbage, recyclables, construction waste, and fill material.

Of the 11,500 tons per day of so-called municipal waste, about 36 percent is recyclable material as designated under the city’s current recycling program. That means that, even if every accepted item was recycled, there would still be almost 7,360 tons of waste a day to get rid of. read more »

Daniel Avery is Sustainability and Climate Change Program Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

As an institution devoted to the celebration of Earth’s plant life—to the beauty and diversity and ecological importance of plants, to the role that plants play in making all life on Earth possible, to the million ways plants contribute to human health and happiness—The New York Botanical Garden is dedicated to the conservation of plants and the systems on which they rely. So nowhere is the cliché “every day is Earth Day” truer than here at the Garden. Our core institutional missions of education, horticulture, and science are, through the plant world, directly tied to a functioning and protected environment. This is why we strive to improve our own environmental performance (to be more sustainable, if you will) and to teach others how to do so as well.

For those who visit the Garden to enjoy, say, the Holiday Train Show or the explosion of floral magnificence known as spring or some other such event, this broader perspective can be easy to miss. For that matter, even those of us who work at the Garden can slip easily enough into our individual niches and lose sight of the Garden’s broader environmental role—that, for example, our 250 acres of gardens, forest, wetlands, and green spaces nestled into a spectacularly urban setting provide many important environmental services we don’t always think about. Or that our scientists are contributing to conservation around the world. Or that our educators are spreading the word far and wide, including to the next generation of leaders, about the importance of understanding and protecting the world in which we live.

Earth Day should remind us of all this, of the ongoing and critical relationship between each of us (as people, as institutions) and our environment. It should remind us of what we do right, where we can improve, and, not least of all, why we care. There is no better place than The New York Botanical Garden to come and renew one’s love of Mother Earth on Earth Day. The Garden—indeed, any garden—thrives in that space where the natural world of soil, water, sun, and plants intersects with the human environment. And that, from an environmental and human perspective, is the intersection that matters.

So, here at the Garden we have decided to celebrate Earth Month, to give ourselves a little more time to linger over the relationship we share with the natural world. And we invite you all to join us to hear what we have to say and to share with us your thoughts on this most important of topics.